You'll get place-based research guidance, resource listings and maps
for every US state, detailed county-level source information, help
with municipal records, and demos of strategies for finding Patriot
ancestors.

PERSI, aka the Periodical Source Index, may be about to go from
one of the best most-overlooked genealogy resources to one of the
best most-used.

Brightsolid, the British company behind findmypast.com and other
genealogy websites, has agreed with PERSI's creators
at the Allen
County (Ind.) Public Library (ACPL) to publish the index—and the company plans to make each index entry link to an image of the
article it refers to.

Let's back up for a minute and talk about PERSI: It's an index to
articles in thousands of genealogy and local history periodicals published in the US and Canada back to 1800. Any of which could contain information that
helps you with a family or place you're researching

The index was made searchable on
Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest Online (which has a more
recent version you can search at libraries that offer
HeritageQuest Online). You can run a search, and then if you
find an index entry that mentions a family or place of interest, you can order a copy
of the article from ACPL.

That's been the only way for you to access all those
genealogy periodicals. You know,
unless you want to subscribe to all of them, and then read them.
And then find the periodicals no longer in publication, and read
those, too.

Until now. If brightsolid can secure permission from publishers,
findmypast.com subscribers will be able to search for articles
related to their ancestors, and then link to digitized images of
the articles. That can't happen soon enough as far as I'm
concerned.

The US show "Who Do You Think You Are?" doesn't debut on TLC until
July 23, but you already can watch the first episode, featuring
singer Kelly Clarkson, on iTunes. Thomas
MacEntee of GeneaBloggers tells you how (you'll need to sign
up for an Apple ID if you're not already on iTunes).

This morning I watched along as Clarkson traced her Civil War
ancestor Isaiah Rose from Ohio to Georgia, where he was imprisoned
at Andersonville, and back.

Kelly Clarkson is a hugger. It seems weird to me to hug the archivists and historians at the library, but then I'm not a big hugger in general. If you're learning remarkable and humbling new stories about your ancestors, maybe hugging would be part of your genealogy happy dance.

I don't want to give too much away before the episode airs. So all
I'll say is that viewers get to visit the Andersonville National Historic Site, see historical illustrations and photos (including a shocking image of a man
who was held there), and hear a contemporary account from a prisoner.
To me, that's the best part of the show—you learn about the history that might have
affected your own ancestors and that shaped our country.

This was a totally unexpected find: I was casually searching
the Library of Congress
website for old images of Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine
neighborhood, where several ancestors lived. This
photo popped up in my results:

The building closest to the camera was once my great-great-grandfather's cigar store and family home. The picture is part of a group of shots from the neighborhood, taken in 1982
for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). There's an
accompanying PDF document with history and architecture notes.

When I opened the giant high-resolution TIFF of the image, I saw
this:

Do you see it, too? It's a "ghost sign"—the outline of some of the
letters from the store's "H.A. Seeger Cigar Manufacturer" sign. Here's a closer look at part of it:

My mom once drove us kids by the building, and we saw where the letters had been. I've often wished we took
a photo during that stop—the building's been renovated and
that ghost sign is gone. So this is an extra-special find.

This copy of a photo from my family collection shows what the sign
looked like back in the day:

In an earlier picture I've posted before, the sign's lettering was different and there was no street lamp or window on the first floor. If I can figure out when those updates happened, it'll help me date this photo.

Here's how found the photo: On the Library of Congress site, I searched for the term Cincinnati German and limited my
results to "Photo, Print, Drawing," like so:

The group of pictures was second in my search results. Not everything in the LOC catalog is digitized online, but luckily, these are. I knew
to click on it because the streets in the description are the
ones around the building.

You can learn more about finding, identifying and preserving old photos from
our Photo Detective Collection, with study materials from photo
historian Maureen A. Taylor and digital photography expert Nancy
Hendrickson.

I set up a Genealogy notebook "stack", and within that,
notebooks for branches I'm researching.

When I need to put a record to request on my genealogy to-do
list, I make a note in the appropriate notebook (usually I just
copy and paste a catalog record and URL from a repository
website) and tag it with the last name, the repository or
website, and other relevant tag.

Next time I plan to visit some repository, or if I want to
focus on a particular family, I can pull up all my notes with
the right tags, and there's my to-do list.

If I'm away from home, I can add a note using the Evernote app
on my phone. I can snap a picture of a record or photo and
attach the image to my note.

Here's a peek at what it looks like. Everything in one place, and
viewable from anywhere:

I'm feeling a lot less scattered, genealogy-wise, these days. I also
use Evernote to keep my grocery list and save business cards, and it
helped me get organized for our vacation last month. It's free,
unless you need a LOT of storage.

I'm sure there's a lot more I could be using it for—sounds like you
can share notes with other researchers and relatives, perform
text-recognition of images to make them searchable, annotate images
using something called Skitch, set up tables, and more.

So I'm looking forward to the webinar with Lisa. It's called Organize
Your Research With Evernote, and it's on Thursday, July 25 at
7 p.m. ET (that's 6 p.m. CT, 5 p.m. MT, 4 p.m. PT).

It's longer than
the teaser that was released at the end of June, and drops clues to
the family history surprises in store for some of the celebrity
guests. You'll see them in the video: Kelly Clarkson, Zooey
Deschanel, Chris O'Donnell, Christina Applegate, Jim Parsons, Cindy
Crawford, Trisha Yearwood and Chelsea Handler. (We
posted here about who these people are.)

You can search for Oregon ancestors in the digital archive at Historical Oregon Newspapers.
The newspapers come from more than 20 Oregon cities and date between
1848 and 1922. Search all the papers on the home page, or click the
Search tab to run an advanced search. You can click a city on the
Oregon map to browse papers from there.